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Ed Webb

moonbell - 0 views

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    Lunar topography music generator. Via @bruces via @peterhorvath
Ed Webb

Mark Zuckerberg says the email's end is nigh. LOL | John Naughton | Comment is free | T... - 1 views

  • I can absolutely envision the rather hellish future, in which we use one of four organizations - Facebook, Apple, Amazon, or Google - for all of our media and communications needs, including talking, chatting, messaging, reading books, watching TV, listening to music, etc, etc.
Ed Webb

Social Media is Killing the LMS Star - A Bootleg of Bryan Alexander's Lost Presentation... - 0 views

  • Note that this isn’t just a technological alternate history. It also describes a different set of social and cultural practices.
  • CMSes lumber along like radio, still playing into the air as they continue to gradually shift ever farther away on the margins. In comparison, Web 2.0 is like movies and tv combined, plus printed books and magazines. That’s where the sheer scale, creative ferment, and wife-ranging influence reside. This is the necessary background for discussing how to integrate learning and the digital world.
  • These virtual classes are like musical practice rooms, small chambers where one may try out the instrument in silent isolation. It is not connectivism but disconnectivism.
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  • CMSes shift from being merely retrograde to being actively regressive if we consider the broader, subtler changes in the digital teaching landscape. Web 2.0 has rapidly grown an enormous amount of content through what Yochai Benkler calls “peer-based commons production.” One effect of this has been to grow a large area for informal learning, which students (and staff) access without our benign interference. Students (and staff) also contribute to this peering world; more on this later. For now, we can observe that as teachers we grapple with this mechanism of change through many means, but the CMS in its silo’d isolation is not a useful tool.
  • those curious about teaching with social media have easy access to a growing, accessible community of experienced staff by means of those very media. A meta-community of Web 2.0 academic practitioners is now too vast to catalogue. Academics in every discipline blog about their work. Wikis record their efforts and thoughts, as do podcasts. The reverse is true of the CMS, the very architecture of which forbids such peer-to-peer information sharing. For example, the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS) has for many years maintained a descriptive listing of courses about digital culture across the disciplines. During the 1990s that number grew with each semester. But after the explosive growth of CMSes that number dwindled. Not the number of classes taught, but the number of classes which could even be described. According to the RCCS’ founder, David Silver (University of San Francisco), this is due to the isolation of class content in CMS containers.
  • unless we consider the CMS environment to be a sort of corporate intranet simulation, the CMS set of community skills is unusual, rarely applicable to post-graduation examples. In other words, while a CMS might help privacy concerns, it is at best a partial, not sufficient solution, and can even be inappropriate for already online students.
  • That experiential, teachable moment of selecting one’s copyright stance is eliminated by the CMS.
  • Another argument in favor of CMSes over Web 2.0 concerns the latter’s open nature. It is too open, goes the thought, constituting a “Wild West” experience of unfettered information flow and unpleasant forms of access. Campuses should run CMSes to create shielded environments, iPhone-style walled gardens that protect the learning process from the Lovecraftian chaos without.
  • social sifting, information literacy, using the wisdom of crowds, and others. Such strategies are widely discussed, easily accessed, and continually revised and honed.
  • at present, radio CMS is the Clear Channel of online learning.
  • For now, the CMS landsape is a multi-institutional dark Web, an invisible, unsearchable, un-mash-up-able archipelago of hidden learning content.
  • Can the practice of using a CMS prepare either teacher or student to think critically about this new shape for information literacy? Moreover, can we use the traditional CMS to share thoughts and practices about this topic?
  • The internet of things refers to a vastly more challenging concept, the association of digital information with the physical world. It covers such diverse instances as RFID chips attached to books or shipping pallets, connecting a product’s scanned UPC code to a Web-based database, assigning unique digital identifiers to physical locations, and the broader enterprise of augmented reality. It includes problems as varied as building search that covers both the World Wide Web and one’s mobile device, revising copyright to include digital content associated with private locations, and trying to salvage what’s left of privacy. How does this connect with our topic? Consider a recent article by Tim O’Reilly and John Battle, where they argue that the internet of things is actually growing knowledge about itself. The combination of people, networks, and objects is building descriptions about objects, largely in folksonomic form. That is, people are tagging the world, and sharing those tags. It’s worth quoting a passage in full: “It’s also possible to give structure to what appears to be unstructured data by teaching an application how to recognize the connection between the two. For example, You R Here, an iPhone app, neatly combines these two approaches. You use your iPhone camera to take a photo of a map that contains details not found on generic mapping applications such as Google maps – say a trailhead map in a park, or another hiking map. Use the phone’s GPS to set your current location on the map. Walk a distance away, and set a second point. Now your iPhone can track your position on that custom map image as easily as it can on Google maps.” (http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194) What world is better placed to connect academia productively with such projects, the open social Web or the CMS?
  • imagine the CMS function of every class much like class email, a necessary feature, but not by any means the broadest technological element. Similarly the e-reserves function is of immense practical value. There may be no better way to share copyrighted academic materials with a class, at this point. These logistical functions could well play on.
Ed Webb

Clear backpacks, monitored emails: life for US students under constant surveillance | E... - 0 views

  • This level of surveillance is “not too over-the-top”, Ingrid said, and she feels her classmates are generally “accepting” of it.
  • One leading student privacy expert estimated that as many as a third of America’s roughly 15,000 school districts may already be using technology that monitors students’ emails and documents for phrases that might flag suicidal thoughts, plans for a school shooting, or a range of other offenses.
  • Some parents said they were alarmed and frightened by schools’ new monitoring technologies. Others said they were conflicted, seeing some benefits to schools watching over what kids are doing online, but uncertain if their schools were striking the right balance with privacy concerns. Many said they were not even sure what kind of surveillance technology their schools might be using, and that the permission slips they had signed when their kids brought home school devices had told them almost nothing
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  • When Dapier talks with other teen librarians about the issue of school surveillance, “we’re very alarmed,” he said. “It sort of trains the next generation that [surveillance] is normal, that it’s not an issue. What is the next generation’s Mark Zuckerberg going to think is normal?
  • “It’s the school as panopticon, and the sweeping searchlight beams into homes, now, and to me, that’s just disastrous to intellectual risk-taking and creativity.”
  • As of 2018, at least 60 American school districts had also spent more than $1m on separate monitoring technology to track what their students were saying on public social media accounts, an amount that spiked sharply in the wake of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive advocacy group that compiled and analyzed school contracts with a subset of surveillance companies.
  • “They are all mandatory, and the accounts have been created before we’ve even been consulted,” he said. Parents are given almost no information about how their children’s data is being used, or the business models of the companies involved. Any time his kids complete school work through a digital platform, they are generating huge amounts of very personal, and potentially very valuable, data. The platforms know what time his kids do their homework, and whether it’s done early or at the last minute. They know what kinds of mistakes his kids make on math problems.
  • Felix, now 12, said he is frustrated that the school “doesn’t really [educate] students on what is OK and what is not OK. They don’t make it clear when they are tracking you, or not, or what platforms they track you on. “They don’t really give you a list of things not to do,” he said. “Once you’re in trouble, they act like you knew.”
  • “They’re so unclear that I’ve just decided to cut off the research completely, to not do any of it.”
  • Many parents also said that they wanted more transparency and more parental control over surveillance. A few years ago, Ben, a tech professional from Maryland, got a call from his son’s principal to set up an urgent meeting. His son, then about nine or 10-years old, had opened up a school Google document and typed “I want to kill myself.” It was not until he and his son were in a serious meeting with school officials that Ben found out what happened: his son had typed the words on purpose, curious about what would happen. “The smile on his face gave away that he was testing boundaries, and not considering harming himself,” Ben said. (He asked that his last name and his son’s school district not be published, to preserve his son’s privacy.) The incident was resolved easily, he said, in part because Ben’s family already had close relationships with the school administrators.
  • there is still no independent evaluation of whether this kind of surveillance technology actually works to reduce violence and suicide.
  • Certain groups of students could easily be targeted by the monitoring more intensely than others, she said. Would Muslim students face additional surveillance? What about black students? Her daughter, who is 11, loves hip-hop music. “Maybe some of that language could be misconstrued, by the wrong ears or the wrong eyes, as potentially violent or threatening,” she said.
  • The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy was founded in 2014, in the wake of parental outrage over the attempt to create a standardized national database that would track hundreds of data points about public school students, from their names and social security numbers to their attendance, academic performance, and disciplinary and behavior records, and share the data with education tech companies. The effort, which had been funded by the Gates Foundation, collapsed in 2014 after fierce opposition from parents and privacy activists.
  • “More and more parents are organizing against the onslaught of ed tech and the loss of privacy that it entails. But at the same time, there’s so much money and power and political influence behind these groups,”
  • some privacy experts – and students – said they are concerned that surveillance at school might actually be undermining students’ wellbeing
  • “I do think the constant screen surveillance has affected our anxiety levels and our levels of depression.” “It’s over-guarding kids,” she said. “You need to let them make mistakes, you know? That’s kind of how we learn.”
Ed Webb

The Myth Of AI | Edge.org - 0 views

  • The distinction between a corporation and an algorithm is fading. Does that make an algorithm a person? Here we have this interesting confluence between two totally different worlds. We have the world of money and politics and the so-called conservative Supreme Court, with this other world of what we can call artificial intelligence, which is a movement within the technical culture to find an equivalence between computers and people. In both cases, there's an intellectual tradition that goes back many decades. Previously they'd been separated; they'd been worlds apart. Now, suddenly they've been intertwined.
  • Since our economy has shifted to what I call a surveillance economy, but let's say an economy where algorithms guide people a lot, we have this very odd situation where you have these algorithms that rely on big data in order to figure out who you should date, who you should sleep with, what music you should listen to, what books you should read, and on and on and on. And people often accept that because there's no empirical alternative to compare it to, there's no baseline. It's bad personal science. It's bad self-understanding.
  • there's no way to tell where the border is between measurement and manipulation in these systems
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  • It's not so much a rise of evil as a rise of nonsense. It's a mass incompetence, as opposed to Skynet from the Terminator movies. That's what this type of AI turns into.
  • What's happened here is that translators haven't been made obsolete. What's happened instead is that the structure through which we receive the efforts of real people in order to make translations happen has been optimized, but those people are still needed.
  • In order to create this illusion of a freestanding autonomous artificial intelligent creature, we have to ignore the contributions from all the people whose data we're grabbing in order to make it work. That has a negative economic consequence.
  • If you talk to translators, they're facing a predicament, which is very similar to some of the other early victim populations, due to the particular way we digitize things. It's similar to what's happened with recording musicians, or investigative journalists—which is the one that bothers me the most—or photographers. What they're seeing is a severe decline in how much they're paid, what opportunities they have, their long-term prospects.
  • because of the mythology about AI, the services are presented as though they are these mystical, magical personas. IBM makes a dramatic case that they've created this entity that they call different things at different times—Deep Blue and so forth. The consumer tech companies, we tend to put a face in front of them, like a Cortana or a Siri
  • If you talk about AI as a set of techniques, as a field of study in mathematics or engineering, it brings benefits. If we talk about AI as a mythology of creating a post-human species, it creates a series of problems that I've just gone over, which include acceptance of bad user interfaces, where you can't tell if you're being manipulated or not, and everything is ambiguous. It creates incompetence, because you don't know whether recommendations are coming from anything real or just self-fulfilling prophecies from a manipulative system that spun off on its own, and economic negativity, because you're gradually pulling formal economic benefits away from the people who supply the data that makes the scheme work.
  • This idea that some lab somewhere is making these autonomous algorithms that can take over the world is a way of avoiding the profoundly uncomfortable political problem, which is that if there's some actuator that can do harm, we have to figure out some way that people don't do harm with it. There are about to be a whole bunch of those. And that'll involve some kind of new societal structure that isn't perfect anarchy. Nobody in the tech world wants to face that, so we lose ourselves in these fantasies of AI. But if you could somehow prevent AI from ever happening, it would have nothing to do with the actual problem that we fear, and that's the sad thing, the difficult thing we have to face.
  • To reject your own ignorance just casts you into a silly state where you're a lesser scientist. I don't see that so much in the neuroscience field, but it comes from the computer world so much, and the computer world is so influential because it has so much money and influence that it does start to bleed over into all kinds of other things.
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